What this is

backBone Brief is a publication about self-hosting: plain-English, opinionated writing about self-hosted software, for people who actually run it.

One person writes it. Every piece starts from the primary source and links to it, never from another publication's summary of it. The opening and the closing of a piece are the writer's own read of the thing; the middle is there to give you the mechanics — who is affected, and what changes for them.

What gets written

Not everything that happens. A release that changes how something behaves gets a piece of its own; a quiet point release gets nothing. Deciding which is which is most of the work, and it is a judgment, not a rule.

What it follows

Self-hosted software end to end: media servers, photo libraries, home automation, networking, storage and backups — and the releases that break them. Among the projects covered: Immich, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Paperless-ngx, Frigate, Tailscale and Grafana.

Corrections

A published piece is never silently edited. If something was wrong, the notice goes at the top of the article, above the first paragraph, and stays there. The corrections page has the policy and the log.

Reading it

The RSS feed links to every article. There is no newsletter yet. The site has no trackers or analytics, and you do not need an account.